Desperate Engagement: How a Little-Known Civil War Battle Saved Washington, D.C., and Changed American History

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Contents

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

DEDICATION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PROLOGUE

One: THE RIVER WITH MANY BENDS

Two: GRANT’S GRAND CAMPAIGN TO END THE WAR

Three: LEE’S BAD OLD MAN

Four: A PLAN OF GREAT BOLDNESS

Five: EARLY’S MARCH TO THE POTOMAC

Six: WALLACE AT THE BOTTOM

Seven: AN INVASION OF A PRETTY FORMIDABLE CHARACTER

Eight: THE BEST LITTLE BATTLE OF THE WAR

Nine: THE WHIZ OF FLYING IRON

Ten: SHORT, DECISIVE, AND BLOODY

Eleven: AFTERMATH

Twelve: GREAT ALARM IN BALTIMORE AND WASHINGTON

Thirteen: SUNDAY, JULY 10: A STRANGE SABBATH DAY

Fourteen: MONDAY, JULY 11: GREATLY IN NEED OF PRIVATES

Fifteen: MONDAY, JULY 11: A DESPERATE ENGAGEMENT

Sixteen: HEAVENS HUNG IN BLACK

Seventeen: SCARED AS BLUE AS HELL’S BRIMSTONE

Eighteen: AN EGREGIOUS BLUNDER

Nineteen: THE VERDICT

EPILOGUE

Appendix 1: UNION ORDER OF BATTLE: THE BATTLE OF MONOCACY, JULY 9, 1864

Appendix 2: CONFEDERATE ORDER OF BATTLE: THE BATTLE OF MONOCACY, JULY 9, 1864

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ALSO BY MARC LEEPSON

COPYRIGHT

To my beloved aunt Sally Sherman

and

in memory of my parents,

Selma and Arthur Leepson

Acknowledgments

The idea for this book came from the fertile mind of my literary agent, Joseph Brendan Vallely. Once again Joe was with me every step of the way in the publishing process, giving me much-needed (and nearly always on-the-money) advice when he wasn’t giving me my fair share of abuse for various book biz missteps.

I am extremely happy and grateful that I again had the opportunity to work with Pete Wolverton, the associate publisher at Thomas Dunne Books. He saw the merit in this book and guided me expertly through the book-making process. That also goes for assistant editor Katie Gilligan. Thanks to both of you for helping me make this book, as well as to copyeditor Paul Montazzoli.

I was warmly welcomed and given exceptional assistance by the staff at the Monocacy National Battlefield. Thanks to Susan W. Trail, the superintendent; Brett Spaulding, park ranger and volunteer coordinator; Cathy Keeler, chief of resource education and visitor services; and to volunteer Mary Ann Heddleson.

Special thanks to Gail Stephens at Monocacy, who took the time to do an amazingly thorough job of reading and critiquing the first draft of this book and whose every suggested change (and correction) I gratefully made. Gail has done extremely valuable work collecting archival information on the battle and on Early’s Shenandoah Valley Campaign at libraries and archives across the nation. Her knowledge of the Monocacy battlefield and her willingness to share that information are unsurpassed and immensely appreciated.

Gloria Swift, the curator at Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site in Washington, who spent many years at Monocacy, also shared her extensive knowledge of the battle, as well as the bigger picture. I am very much in debt to Gloria and Gail for providing me with excellent tours of the battlefield. And to the eminent Civil War historian James McPherson for his guidance on the bigger picture issues.

Thanks also to Douglas K. Harvey, the museum director for the Lynchburg Museum System in Virginia, who, with the Battle of Lynchburg expert Van Naisawald, kindly critiqued my section on that engagement. And to Scott H. Harris, the director of the New Market Battlefield State Historical Park in Virginia, who read the section on that battle and events before and after.

I depended heavily on the expertise and assistance of many librarians and archivists, all of whom came up with materials that I never could have found on my own. Thanks to John M. Coski, the historian and director of library and research, and Ruth Ann Coski, the library manager, who did a thorough search of their extensive archives at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond.

My everlasting gratitude goes to the terrific staff at the Middleburg (Virginia) Library: Sheila Whetzel, Dorothy Donahoe, Heather Eickmeyer, and Tina Thomas; and to my support group at the Loudoun County (Virginia) Public Library, especially Mary Lou Demeo, Linda Holstslander, Cindy Tufts, Doug Henderson, and ILL wizard Robert Boley.

I had the always excellent advice and assistance of my friends at the Library of Virginia in Richmond: Tom Camden, the manager of special collections; Audrey C. Johnson, the senior rare book librarian; Conley Edwards, the state archivist; Tom Crew and Minor Weisiger, archives research services; Nolan Yelich, the librarian of Virginia; Sandy Treadway, the deputy librarian; and Jan Hathcock, the public relations manager.

Special thanks to Mary Beth McIntire, the executive director of the Library of Virginia Foundation, and her capable and helpful staff: Joseph Papa, Rick Golembowski, and Elizabeth Weakley.

Other librarians, archivists, and academicians who helped me include: Alexandra Gressitt and Mary Fischback at the Thomas Balch Library in Leesburg, Virginia; John Miller of the Emmitsburg (Maryland) Historical Society; Roger C. Adams, the rare books librarian, special collections, at the Hale Library at Kansas State University; James Owens, professor of history at Lynchburg (Virginia) College; Len Latkovski, professor of history and chair of the history department at Hood (Maryland) College; Peggy Stillman, the Chesapeake (Virginia) Public Library director; and Bruce A. Thompson, professor of history at Frederick (Maryland) Community College.

Also: Elisabeth A. Proffen, the special collections librarian, and Francis P. O’Neill, reference librarian at the Maryland Historical Society’s H. Furlong Baldwin Library in Baltimore; Mary K. Mannix, Maryland Room manager at the C. Burr Artz Central Library in Frederick County, Maryland; David Hostetter, director of research and programs at the Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies at Shepherd University in West Virginia; Rodney Davis, codirector of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College in Illinois; and Dr. John R. Sellers of the Library of Congress’s Manuscript Division reference staff.

*   *   *

Many friends have helped me with the book with ideas, information, and with just plain support. Thanks to: Xande Anderer, Cliff Boyle, Bernie and Linda Brien, Amoret Bruguiere, Childs Burden, Shane Chalke, Bob Corolla, Larry Cushman, John Czaplewski, Diane Deitz, Tommy and Marianne Dodson, Benton Downer, Pat Duncan, Russell Duncan, Dale Dye, Bill Ehrhart, Carol Engle, Bill and Sue Ferster, Randy Fertel, Bill Fogarty, Gail Guttman, Sgt. Rob Gwynn, Billy Hendon, John R. Hoffecker, Peter Horan, Tom Jewell, Ava Jones, Wayne Karlin, Michael Keating, and Michael (M-60) Kelley.

And Evan Leepson, Peter and Ellen Leepson, Treavor Lord, Hunt Lyman, Glenn Maravetz, Dave Miller, Rick Moock, Dan Murphy, Katherine Neville, Tom and Ann Northrup, Angus Paul, Mokie Porter, Mike Powers, Susan and Gray Price, Gomer Pyles, Dan and Margie Radovsky, Pat and Barbara Rhodes, Moses Robbins, Margo Sherman, Richard Strother, Dave Tarrant, Susan and Fraser Wallace, David Willson, Bob and Martha Wilson, and Susan and Saul Zucker.

Special thanks to Liz Nelson Weaver for indulging me with the constant changes on the three excellent maps she created.

I humbly thank my biggest cheerleader and the best proofreader I know, my precious aunt Sally Sherman, and my loving family—my wife, Janna, and my children, Devin and Cara—for putting up with me during the research and writing of this book.

Thank you, too, Cara, for thoughtfully tacking the following hand-lettered sign to my office door, without which it is doubtful that I would have been able to complete this book: DO NOT INTERRUPT ME. OTHERWISE I WILL GET REAL ANGRY. COME BACK IN 15–20 MINUTES.

This was one of the sharpest and most bloody fights of the war and our Brigade lost fully one half of the men that went into action, including several of our best officers.

—CONFEDERATE CAPTAIN WILLIAM J. SEYMOUR OF THE FIRST LOUISIANA BRIGADE ON THE JULY 9, 1864, BATTLE OF MONOCACY

Now began a desperate engagement.… In no other engagement of our three years’ service did we witness so many acts of individual valor and daring.…

—UNION PRIVATE THOMAS H. SCOTT OF COMPANY B, 122ND NEW YORK VOLUNTEER INFANTRY REGIMENT, ON THE FIGHTING OUTSIDE FORT STEVENS IN WASHINGTON, D.C., ON JULY 11, 1864

Prologue

On the blisteringly hot afternoon of Monday, July 11, 1864, the bold, battle-hardened Confederate general Jubal Anderson Early sat astride his horse outside the gates of Fort Stevens in the upper northwestern fringe of Washington, D.C. The enigmatic forty-seven-year-old Early, a veteran of Gettysburg, Antietam, the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, and a dozen other bloody battles, was about to make one of the Civil War’s most fateful, portentous decisions: whether or not to order his ten thousand veteran rebel troops to invade the nation’s capital.

Almost exactly a month earlier, Early’s commanding general, the gentlemanly Robert E. Lee, had made a bold, risky decision. He’d ordered Early’s Second Corps to cut itself out of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, which had hunkered down outside Richmond awaiting the next move by Union army commander U. S. Grant, who had massed an unprecedented number of troops outside the capital of the Confederacy.

In the predawn hours of June 13, Early marched his men out of their Richmond-area encampment and into Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Lee had ordered Early to wreak havoc on Yankee troops in the valley, then to move north and invade Maryland. Lee envisioned an audacious mission: to free some fifteen thousand Confederate prisoners at the Point Lookout POW camp east of Washington in southern Maryland, and, if Early found the conditions right, to take the war for the first time into President Lincoln’s front yard. Also on Lee’s agenda: forcing Grant to release a good number of troops from the stranglehold he had built around Richmond.

*   *   *

Early followed Lee’s orders. He swiftly and stealthily moved his men through the valley and on July 5 crossed the Potomac into Maryland. Then he slowly moved east. There was panic in the streets of Washington—and in Baltimore thirty-five miles to the north—when word reached the citizenry that Early’s troops were heading in their direction. Washington, although it was ringed by an impressive array of interconnected forts and fortifications, was drastically underdefended in July of 1864.

Once manned by tens of thousands of experienced troops, the city’s defenses were in the hands of a ragtag collection of walking-wounded Union soldiers grouped in a unit called the Veteran Reserve Corps, formerly known by the inglorious name the Invalid Corps, along with so-called hundred days’ men from Ohio—raw recruits who had joined the Union army to serve as temporary, rear-echelon troops in the North.

Help was on the way. Grant, doing what Lee had hoped he would, at the eleventh hour had ordered thousands of battle-tested Union troops from his Sixth Corps north to Washington. This came only after a series of desperate telegrams from Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck, the U.S. Army chief of staff in Washington, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, and President Lincoln himself. Their pleas convinced Grant to part with a large contingent of seasoned troops taking part in his ongoing siege of Richmond and Petersburg, the linchpin of Grant’s plan for the final defeat of Lee’s army.

It was now up to the crusty, tobacco-chewing, foul-mouthed, hard-drinking Early whether or not to pull the trigger outside of Fort Stevens.

*   *   *

Consider the political and military ramifications of his next move, as Early did as he stared through his field glasses at the U.S. Capitol dome at high noon on that hot July day. If he broke through the ring of forts surrounding the city, Confederate veterans would be running loose on the streets of Washington, D.C. The U.S. Treasury, virtually undefended, was sitting ready for looting. Tons upon tons of brand-new, desperately needed war supplies, from blankets to rifles, were there for the taking. The president himself was a target of opportunity, not to mention the U.S. Capitol and dozens of other government buildings. And there was the releasing of what amounted to an entire corps of imprisoned Southern troops at Point Lookout.

Would Lincoln, even if he escaped Early’s men (a ship docked on the Potomac near the White House waited to spirit him out of town), have had even a chance of convincing war-weary Northern voters to reelect him in the upcoming presidential election?

Would Early’s raid lead to a Democrat—maybe even a pro-Southern Copperhead—winning the White House in November?

Would the fact that—regardless of what Early did at the gates of Washington—Grant was forced to take a large number of troops away from Richmond for weeks, if not months, delay what the Union high command envisioned as a massive, war-ending battle?

Would a Confederate advance into the heart of Washington finally convince England and France to back the Southern cause economically and militarily?

A rebel occupation of Washington for however brief a time, former secretary of the Senate George C. Gorham later wrote, would have brought about serious consequences. One of them would almost certainly have embraced the recognition of the Southern Confederacy by France and England, both of which governments were understood to be extremely desirous of even a slight pretext for such action.

With Washington in the hands of the enemy, it would have been impossible to prophesy the foreign complications, then secretary of the Treasury Leslie M. Shaw said in 1902, to say nothing of the demoralization of the people of the United States.

Widespread demoralization—and any one of the other scenarios—surely would have brought about Union war concessions, including some sort of compromise peace plan that included giving the South the states’ rights it fought for. That included the No. 1 right in the minds of nearly all Southern politicians, the institution of slavery.

*   *   *

What follows is a recounting of four short, but pivotal, weeks in the long American Civil War, beginning on June 13 when Jubal Early left Richmond, reaching their apogee on July 11 when he stood at the gates of the nation’s capital prepared to invade Washington. What took place during those four weeks had an underappreciated, but very significant, impact on the course of the Civil War—and upon American history.

ONE

The River with Many Bends

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

—WILLIAM FAULKNER, REQUIEM FOR A NUN

The Monocacy River begins near the Maryland-Pennsylvania border just west of the small town of Harney, Maryland, six miles due south of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The river, the largest Maryland tributary to the Potomac, meanders southeast for about sixty miles. It flows a few miles east of the city of Frederick before emptying out into the Potomac about fifty miles northwest of Washington, D.C. The sixty-odd-mile swath of gently rolling woodlands and fertile farm fields surrounding the river in the western Maryland Piedmont Plateau is known as the Monocacy Valley.

Archaeologists have found evidence that bands of nomadic Native American hunters inhabited the Monocacy Valley as early as the year 2000 BC. While there seem to have been few, if any, permanent Indian settlements, the valley was a favorite hunting ground for several tribes, including the Algonquian-language Piscataway and Nanticokes, which had settled in Maryland and Virginia’s eastern coastal regions. The Monocacy River became an important source of transportation for the Indians, who also cut a series of trails through the densely wooded valley.

When the first Europeans came to western Maryland in the 1630s, they found the warlike Susquehannock living in settlements in the valley and to the north and east. During the next ninety years several other tribes—the Algonkian Shawnee, the Delaware, the Catawba, and the Tuscarora—either set up settlements or traveled through the area on hunting expeditions.

The settlers and Indians were drawn by a pristine river valley just east of the two-thousand-foot Catoctin Mountain (and current-day U.S. Route 15) overflowing with chestnut, hickory, and oak forests abounding with deer, buffalo, black bears, muskrats, elk, caribou, and turkey—along with extremely fertile soil. The river itself and its tributaries teemed with fish, turtles, and terrapins.

By the late 1720s, however, the Indian tribes were gone. They had fled west in the wake of a flood of European settlers, mainly Scots/Irish from Northern Ireland, English land speculators, and emigrants from the Palatinate region of the Rhine in Germany. Many of the latter arrived from heavily German Pennsylvania via what was known as the Monocacy Road. That road began near York, cut southwesterly through Pennsylvania into Maryland through the Monocacy Valley, and then crossed the Potomac River and into Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.

The Indians who lived in the Monocacy Valley may have disappeared by the late 1720s, but they left behind their name for the river and its surrounding area. The Seneca called the river Cheneoow-quoquey. The earliest European settlers in the 1720s called it Quattaro and Coturki, names that also were sometimes given to the nearby Potomac. The name that stuck, Monocacy, is a variant of the Shawnee word Monnockkesey, roughly translated as river with many bends.

*   *   *

There may have been a village called Monocacy established by German-speaking settlers from Pennsylvania around 1729 located about fifteen miles north of Frederick, near the current-day town of Creagerstown. It is the site of the first German church, known as the Log Church, erected in Maryland. Archaeological and historical evidence that the little village did, in fact, exist, however, is inconclusive.

What we do know for certain is that John Thomas Schley (1712–89), the leader of a group of some one hundred Palatinate Germans, founded the city of Frederick (then called Frederick Town) near the midpoint of the Monocacy Valley in 1745. Schley, historians believe, chose the name in honor of Frederick Calvert (1731–71), the sixth (and last) Lord Baltimore, who had inherited (but never set foot in) the English province of Maryland in 1751. The city of Frederick, standing as it did as a crossroads between the growing cities of the east and the frontier to the west, soon blossomed and became the largest city in western Maryland.

It was here in 1755, a year after the start of the French and Indian War, that British major general Edward Braddock, the commander in chief of all British forces in North America, met with Benjamin Franklin (then a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly) and Braddock’s trusted military aide George Washington. They came to Frederick to plan Braddock’s next move—what turned out to be a disastrous expedition to try to take the French-held Fort Duquesne in what today is downtown Pittsburgh.

Ten years later, in 1765, Frederick was the scene of a heated protest over the British Stamp Act. Twelve Frederick County judges issued a statement on November 23, condemning that much reviled taxation-without-representation legislation.

One of the judges, Thomas Johnson (1732–1819), became the state of Maryland’s first elected governor and later an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Two other famed early American lawyers also called Frederick home: Francis Scott Key (1779–1843), best known as the author of The Star-Spangled Banner, and his brother-in-law, Roger Brooke Taney (1777–1864), the fifth chief justice of the United States, best known for issuing the 1857 Supreme Court Dred Scott decision, which denied citizenship to all African Americans, whether they were slaves or freemen.

By 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, the city of Frederick’s population reached 8,143, and the surrounding Frederick County was home to some 40,000 people. Frederick grew, in large part, because of its geographic location as a natural east-west and north-south transportation hub and crossroads. The Baltimore Pike (also known as the National Road) connected Frederick with Maryland’s largest port city to the east. The Georgetown Pike linked Frederick to the nation’s capital some forty miles to the southeast.

The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O), the nation’s first chartered passenger and freight railway, began construction in Baltimore in 1828. It reached the outskirts of Frederick in 1831. Like the Monocacy River, the B&O skirted Frederick about four miles to the southeast of the city. After protests from the city’s fathers, the B&O laid tracks from a spot at the western bank of the Monocacy River and built a 3.5-mile spur into the city.

The triangular piece of land, officially known as Frederick Junction, was commonly referred to as Monocacy Junction. The B&O erected a wooden bridge to span the Monocacy at the junction, then replaced it with a more-sturdy (and expensive) iron suspension bridge.

*   *   *

Maryland, sitting as it does below the Mason-Dixon line, was a slave state. But it was also a geographically and socially divided border state. Tobacco plantations, which depended heavily on slave labor, dominated southern Maryland. The state’s northern and western regions, on the other hand, had few slave-holding families and, in fact, were home to many freed blacks.

When Fort Sumter fell on April 13, 1861, and the Civil War began, Maryland’s citizens were nearly equally divided among those who supported the Union and those whose sympathies lay with the Confederate States of America (CSA). When troops of the Sixth Massachusetts Volunteers arrived in Baltimore by train on April 19 on the way to Washington, a prosecessionist mob attacked them. That urban skirmish resulted in the deaths of four soldiers and twelve civilians. Fearing that unrest would spread throughout Maryland, President Lincoln sent Gen. Benjamin Franklin Butler to occupy the capital of Annapolis on April 22.

On that day Gov. Thomas Holliday Hicks called a special session of the Maryland General Assembly to discuss where the state’s loyalty would go. Instead of meeting in Annapolis, which was strongly pro-Confederate, Hicks, a member of the Native American Party (known as the Know-Nothings), took the legislature to Frederick, where sympathies strongly favored the Union. The General Assembly did not vote to secede, nor did it strongly support the Union. The legislators’ goal seemed to be neutrality.

On September 17, when the General Assembly gathered after a six-week adjournment, federal troops and Baltimore police officers arrived in Frederick to arrest prosecessionist members. That act ended the official movement in Maryland to align the state with the Confederacy. But it did not end Maryland’s direct involvement in the war. Much of that involvement centered on Frederick because of its location as both a north-south and an east-west crossroads.

Contingents of Union troops bivouacked in the city and its surrounding areas, including Monocacy Junction, beginning in the summer of 1861. These included units assigned to guard the Monocacy Bridge and the railroad throughout much of the next four years. There were also large bands of Union and Confederate forces that moved into and out of Frederick and its environs during the war. Most of that action took place during the South’s three invasions of the North: in September 1862, in July 1863, and in July 1864.

Robert E. Lee’s forty-five-thousand-man Army of Northern Virginia began crossing the Potomac near Leesburg, Virginia, on September 4, 1862, in the South’s first invasion of the North. Three days later Lee’s troops marched into Frederick. They promptly took possession of the city without a shot being fired. Lee had hoped that he would be warmly greeted by pro-Confederates in Frederick. But his reception was lukewarm at best, a state of affairs memorialized in the (most likely apocryphal) poem Barbara Frietschie by John Greenleaf Whittier.

In that much-recited poem, Whittier describes how the townspeople of Frederick had taken down their American flags just before Lee’s army marched through the city. The patriotic Frietschie, then ninety-five years old, according to Whittier (who heard the story secondhand), bravely flew the flag from her dormer window. When famed Confederate general Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson rode by, he ordered his men to shoot the flag down.

The determined Barbara Frietschie responded by saying, Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, but spare your country’s flag. Her outspokenness shamed Jackson, who then told his men not to touch a hair of yon gray head.

That story may not be true, but it illustrates the pro-Union sentiment in the city, and gives the flavor of the reception that greeted Lee’s men.

Following the march through Frederick, Lee made his headquarters at what was then known as South Hermitage Farm, three miles south of the city and a stone’s throw from Monocacy Junction and the Georgetown Pike (today’s Route 355). Lee’s troops arrived just after the departure of the recently formed Fourteenth New Jersey Volunteer Infantry Regiment, which had been sent to the junction to guard the B&O Railroad Bridge over the Monocacy River. Lee’s army pitched tents in the fields, and Confederate soldiers used the river to bathe and wash their uniforms.

It was at that spot on September 8 that Lee drew up his Proclamation to the People of Maryland, a plea for Marylanders to join the Confederacy. It had little effect in pro-Union western Maryland. Lee abandoned his camp and moved his troops west of Frederick on September 10.

The day before Lee had written—and his assistant adjutant general Robert Chilton drew up—Special Orders No. 191, a ten-part document outlining the operational details of Lee’s plan. The order provided specific instructions to Lee’s lieutenants, including Stonewall Jackson, James Longstreet, J. E. B. Stuart, and Daniel Harvey Hill.

Chilton made copies of the order and sent them to each of Lee’s generals, including Hill. When he received his copy of the order, Stuart had another copy made and sent to Hill because he had been under Jackson’s command. That copy—or the original—never made it to Hill, probably because the courier carrying the document somehow lost it. Hill, of course, did not realize that fact since he had received one copy of the order and was not expecting another.

On September 13 troops from the Union army’s Twelfth Corps set up camp on the same site where Hill had camped a few days earlier. That day two soldiers of the Twenty-seventh Indiana—accounts differ as to their identity—happened upon a strange package sitting in the tall grass: three cigars wrapped in paper. When the men looked at the paper wrapper, they were startled to see the label Headquarters, Army of Northern Virginia, Special Orders, No. 191, signed by Robert Chilton. They had stumbled upon one of the copies of the order that was supposed to go to Hill.

The Union troops turned the order over to their superiors, and it made its way to Gen. George B. McClellan at his headquarters nearby. McClellan realized the value of the order; but, true to his usual method of operations, was slow to act on the startling intelligence, delaying his march from Frederick. Meanwhile, Lee learned through a Confederate sympathizer who happened to be in McClellan’s camp when the order arrived that the enemy knew his battle plan.

The day before, on September 12, McClellan’s troops had crossed the Monocacy and followed Lee into Frederick, where the populace greeted his army enthusiastically. Our troops were wildly welcomed, the pro-Union Harper’s Weekly reported the following week. The three stone bridges across the Monocacy were found uninjured, though the fine iron railroad bridge was destroyed.

Troops from the Fourteenth New Jersey, which would return to Monocacy to fight in the big July 9, 1864, battle there, joined railroad workers who had begun replacing the bridge on September 17, the same day that the infamous slaughter took place at the Battle of Antietam just outside Sharpsburg, Maryland, about fifteen miles west of Frederick.

At Antietam, McClellan’s 80,000-man Army of the Potomac went head-to-head with Lee’s army in what has the unhappy distinction of being the bloodiest one day in American history. Nearly 22,000 Americans were killed, wounded, or went missing in that day of fighting. That included 2,100 dead and 9,550 wounded Union troops and 1,550 dead and 7,750 wounded Confederate soldiers. The Battle of Antietam ended in a stalemate, but one that forced Lee to retreat to Virginia.

McClellan famously did not pursue Lee into Virginia, a tactical error of such magnitude that Lincoln would strip him of his command on November 5. In early October Lee took advantage of McClellan’s inaction by ordering some eighteen hundred Confederate cavalry troops with four pieces of horse artillery under Maj. Gen. J. E. B. Stuart to go back across the Potomac. At daylight on October 10, Stuart and his raiding party crossed the river near Williamsport, Maryland, and proceeded to raid the nearby Pennsylvania cities of Mercersburg and Chambersburg. Stuart’s men then moved southeast into Maryland, through Emmittsburg, Liberty, New Market, Hyattstown, and Barnesville.

When he reached White’s Ford, below the mouth of the Monocacy, Lee later reported, Stuart had made a complete circuit of the enemy’s position. After a short rest at Urbana, just south of Monocacy Junction, Stuart headed back to Virginia. On approaching the Potomac he was opposed by the enemy’s cavalry, under General Stoneman, but drove them back, and put to flight the infantry stationed on the bluff at White’s Ford, Lee noted. Stuart then returned to Virginia. The expedition, Lee said, was eminently successful, and accomplished without other loss than the wounding of 1 man.

Stuart’s evaluation of the raid was even more laudatory. The results of this expedition, in a moral and political point of view, can hardly be estimated, he said a week later, and the consternation among property holders in Pennsylvania beggars description.

Eight months later, Lee launched his second invasion of the North. Following up on his smashing victory at Chancellorsville early in May of 1863, Lee devised a plan to take his seventy-five-thousand-man Army of Northern Virginia northward again. The aim this time was to resupply his troops; get the Union army to leave Virginia; and perhaps threaten Philadelphia, Baltimore, and the national capital in Washington.

After victories at Winchester and Martinsburg, Virginia, Gen. Richard S. Ewell’s Second Corps crossed the Potomac